Itanium demand brings strong Q3 numbers to HP

HP did well in its latest fiscal quarter. This is well covered throughout the interwebs; The Register says it thusly, leaning on research from Gartner:

Gartner had the worldwide server market growing by 8.7 per cent in terms of shipments to 2.2m units and increasing revenue 2.6 per cent to $13.4bn. The analyst house attributed the healthy sales figures to strong demand for beefy RISC/Itanium servers. This marks the first time in many moons that a major analyst firm has pointed to Big Iron instead of x86 systems as the main driver of growth in a quarter.

…Looking at shipments alone, HP remained the top worldwide server seller (29 per cent market share) and enjoyed year-over-year growth of 20 per cent. Dell again took the second spot in shipments (21.8 per cent) and grew sales by 5.4 per cent.

Meanwhile, IBM (14.4 per cent) suffered from a 4 per cent dip in shipments, while Sun (3.6 per cent) shed 4.5 per cent.

Comments

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that larger IT shops would be switching back to big iron. The machines are more efficient, more powerful, more flexible and more reliable (mainframe-class RAS) than the small boxes that are now crowding our data centers. We’re consolidating over 200 servers onto a single IBM p-595, which will require only four LPARs and 20 WPARs. We won’t need six, very expensive SEs to manage the new infrastructure; two will do. Performance of our various applications increased 40% on average in our validation testing. Power consumption dropped by 60% and heat production dropped by 45%. 260 sq. ft of floor space will be freed up. Also, we anticipate that our overall cost to run the infrastructue will decrease by more than $5M annually.

Gartner estimates that 70% of all businesses will be consolidating their data centers onto fewer, larger platforms over the next five years. The day of trying to host applications and manage data on farms of small boxes is coming to an end. We’ve wasted an awful lot of money trying to do IT on the cheap over the last several years and now it’s time to do it correctly. IBM and HP understands this, and they are having a lot of success with their p-series and Integrity Superdome lines. They understood that the claim that “big iron is dead” was only FUD by those selling entry-level equipment and from the kiddies, who know little to nothing about enterprise computing.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

"Exascale computers are going to deliver only one or two per cent of their theoretical peak performance when they run real applications; and both the people paying for, and the people using, such machines need to have realistic expectations about just how low a percentage of the peak performance they will obtain." [Read More...]